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Developing Control Panel for Sensor Activity in PSLab Android

Once we are able to capture data from the sensor using the PSLab device and stimulate it on PSLab Android App, we now require to provide the user various control options. These control options help the user to customize the data captures from the sensors. These options are available for all the sensors.

Number of samples: This allows the user to enter the number of samples he/she wants to capture.

Indefinite mode: This allows the user to capture indefinite samples from the sensors.

Play/Pause: This allows the user to start or pause the capture anytime.

Time-gap: User can set the time-gap between each sample capture.

Let’s discuss how to implement these control options in PSLab Android.

Creating layout for Control Panel

Initially, a control panel is created. A separate layout is created for the same in the sensor activity. Inside the layout, we added

An Image-Button which works as a play and pause button

An Edit-Text in which the user can enter the number of samples to be captured.

A Check-Box which enables indefinite sample capture.

A Seek-Bar which sets the time-gap between each sample capture.

Adding functionality to widgets.

Image-Button on-click listener has two roles to play. One role is to change the play image to pause image or vice versa and another is to set boolean variable true or false. This variable is used to stop or start the thread which is involved in fetching data from the sensor.

The play variable can be accessed by the different fragment to pause or resume the capture of the data from the sensors.

if(scienceLab.isConnected()&&((SensorActivity)getActivity()).play){//rest of the code}

The number entered in the Edit-Box work as the maximum limit of samples to be captured. For this, a simple counter function is implemented. If the count value reaches the value in Edit-Box the thread is AsyncTask for fetching sensor data is not called any further. Enabling the Check-Box, disables the Edit-Box and hence eliminate the role of counter function resulting in AsyncTask (for fetching sensor data) being called indefinitely.

Time gap Seek-Bar sets the delay between each time AsyncTask for fetching sensor data is called. The thread sleeps for the time selected in the Seek-Bar before AsyncTask is called again. Here is the code snippet for it.